After being acquired by private equity firm GTCR back in May 2014 and merging with PR software company Cision just one month later, Vocus has reorganized and rebranded, extending its marketing automation arm into a standalone company known as OutMarket. As part of the rebranding process, Vocus' small business email marketing offshoot, iContact, now also exists as an independent company.

"The marketing automation space is growing very quickly," You Mon Tsang, a Vocus alumnus and CEO of the newly formed OutMarket, says. "We're seeing a lot more maturity in the offerings, and as a result, more companies are interested in implementing marketing automation technology and seeing what it can do for them," he adds.

Historically, small and midsized companies have been reluctant to adopt marketing automation technology, typically due to cost and implementation difficulties. For companies that earn less than $20 million in revenue, the adoption rate for marketing automation technology is only around 5 percent, Tsang says.

"Early tools were mostly focused on large, enterprise businesses that require heavy integrations with CRM, manage large sales forces, and deal with large leads. It felt very out of reach for small businesses, and even medium-sized businesses thought it wasn't for them," he explains.

The driving force behind the reorganization was to give clients a more focused product, and with OutMarket, Tsang says the focus is on making marketing automation attainable for midsized companies.

"Marketing automation is at the place where CRM was when Salesforce.com got into it. When Salesforce.com got into CRM, there were a lot of players in the space, but they had expensive, complicated tools. Salesforce changed that by making it easy to buy, easy to install, easy to use. People that had resources to buy it saw success, but others couldn't afford [it]," he says, "and marketing automation is in the same place. Now, it needs to be more available to everyone, and that's what we're doing—expanding it."

OutMarket's solution offers a more approachable marketing automation solution—one that Tsang says midsized companies will be more comfortable implementing on their own. Integrations, for example, are done through walk-through wizards rather through heavy coding, which makes them easier for marketers to complete.

Despite its simplicity, however, OutMarket offers a complete suite of marketing automation solutions, including workflow automation, lead scoring, analytics, CRM, landing pages, segmentation, and other functions. And, because Vocus had a now-independent public relations division, OutMarket offers several press release and social media capabilities as well.

"It's very easy to deploy and use, but that doesn't mean it's not a highly sophisticated tool," Tsang says. "It's got all the capabilities of an enterprise solution, but tailored to a midsize marketer's needs," he adds.

For existing Vocus customers, the transition to OutMarket should be a seamless one, according to Tsang. Though many customers have been using a combination of Vocus products, the only difference now will be that instead of signing one agreement with Vocus, they may have to sign individual agreements with the independent companies that Vocus has evolved into.